


You got that medicine I need

by SkyisGray



Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-25
Updated: 2014-04-30
Packaged: 2018-01-20 19:30:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1522871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SkyisGray/pseuds/SkyisGray
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky was trying to enter his room.  </p><p>Bucky is a wildcard right now.</p><p>Bucky could have been seeking Steve’s help, but there is as much of a chance, Steve admits, that he was trying to kill or capture him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Steve

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from the Lana Del Rey song, "Gods and Monsters." 
> 
> Warning for Dub-Con (see end notes for more specific warning)
> 
> So...this is coming up on a year old, and I know I was rusty when I wrote this. I've since contributed several pieces to the Stucky fandom about which I am much more confident, but I couldn't take down my first A03 fic!

Dreams, memories, and fantasies fold themselves together as Steve drifts in and out of consciousness. Each time he opens his eyes, he is able to recognize his surroundings within five seconds. He is able to identify Sam at his left (the friendly devotion between the two men an obvious replacement for someone they have both lost, but Steve isn’t complaining about having a buffer between himself and the doctors), the aching pain in his gut a result of Soviet slugs sans rifling, and the queasy feeling in his stomach as guilt. It takes him a few more seconds to identify the source of the guilt, and when it slams home, he feels like he’s still falling out of the sky.

Bucky.

Bucky is alive, brainwashed, and currently whereabouts unknown without Hydra to contain him. Steve doesn’t want to think about what ‘containing’ Bucky looks like, but he knows that it’s kept him alive for 70 plus years, and that Bucky is, likely for the first time, a weapon without orders or direction. Part of Steve is hoping that Bucky is holed up somewhere in a cheap motel room (still nicer than the apartments they shared over the years) but most of him is waiting to hear that Bucky has stumbled across an innocent bystander and put a bullet to match those the surgeons pulled out of Steve into the person’s head or heart.

Steve hates thinking of Bucky like this, like a homicidal wind-up doll, but he has no evidence that Bucky has any survival skills beyond ensuring the lack of survival of those who get in his way. The bridge had been enough to show him that, and the hellicarier incident only shoved it farther home.

Steve sits up and screws his face up to release some of the pain, but as he is swinging his legs over the right side of the bed, he hears Sam stir behind him.

“Fuck. No. Cap, go back to sleep. We literally had this conversation 45 minutes ago.” Steve puts weight on his feet experimentally, and it’s fine, he only feels like his torso is being stabbed in every direction. Not a stumbling block when one has as much motivation as Steve does. Only Sam is the farthest thing from impressed with his ability to conquer pain. “I will call the nurse. The scary one. The one who looks like she could be Natasha’s long-lost sister.”

“Bucky needs me, Sam.” Standing now, Steve starts to scoot around the bed, only to find that Sam has anticipated his escape and has moved a chair into the way. Steve goes to move the chair, only to find Sam standing in front of him.

“’Bucky’ seems like a pretty self-sufficient guy,” Sam says, and Steve can hear the air quotes around ‘Bucky.’ “I promise that, if there’s anything you can do for him, you can’t do it like this. You agreed with me not an hour ago,” and Sam is leaning over the chair and gently shoving Steve back towards the bed. Steve tries to protest as he slowly succumbs to Sam’s push; in the time since he and Sam had last discussed Steve’s ability (or lack of it) to leave the hospital, find Bucky, and take it from there, he had dreamed up a scenario in which Bucky wandered into a store and laid waste to its patrons, a scenario in which Bucky had no idea how to take care of himself and panicked when the hunger ache in his stomach got worse, and a scenario in which a pocket of Hydra found Bucky and contained him all over again.

Steve slides back into bed as he tries to explain to Sam all of the reasons why he realized he needed to go after Bucky immediately, but his healing factor is already kicking back in and pulling him under so he could go back to knitting flesh and bone back together.

“Damn, Steve, take it easy. You only got shot…13 hours ago. You need to rest for a couple days at least. Couple days, Jesus, I cannot believe that guys like you are real. You know how long it would take me to recover from ONE gunshot…” Steve lets sleep pull him under as he listens to Sam’s bellyaching, already so familiar, because it is familiar. The guy on the other end of the mouth is different, that’s all, which calls to mind Bucky’s mouth and Bucky’s face and Bucky’s everything. He drifts between good memories, better memories of things that never happened, and nightmares for another hour or so before he wakes up and realizes that he has to get to Bucky immediately.

Sam must have the patience of a saint.

 

Three days later, Steve is being released with the instructions that he needs to continue doing restful things for at least a week before jumping into the post-SHIELD fray. Steve smiles and agrees as Sam squints at him, likely knowing that Steve has no plans to sit on a couch or sleep eight hours a night. He’s done his sleeping, there are no longer any physical holes in his body, and his pain level is manageable enough that he could lap Sam without wanting to cry. For Steve’s purposes, he is healed, but he is cognizant enough of the damage done to his body that he awkwardly thanks Sam for corralling him during those first few days in the ICU.

“No sweat,” Sam says, waving a hand but still with that sharp look in his eyes that tells Steve, ‘you’re an idiot.’

“I was kind of an idiot,” he adds to show Sam that yes, he is aware how much of a pain in the ass he was being, and Sam waves his hand again with a smile this time.

“Really man, if I’d been having the dreams you were having, I would have probably been even worse.” Steve does the trauma-really-sucks grin, which Sam echoes, and doesn’t tell Sam that some of his dreams weren’t dreams, and some of his dreams weren’t bad.

For as many visions of Bucky-as-the-Winter-Soldier that woke Steve up gasping and mobilizing, there were memories of Bucky-his-best-friend pulling him out of a fight or putting a cold washcloth on his forehead as he burned from fever. And then there were the not-memories of Bucky-as-his-something else that used to torture him when Bucky came back from a date smelling like sex, or when Bucky ran into him in the bathroom and dropped his towel, completely unaware of what it did to Steve’s pulse, or when Bucky tucked him under his chin at night when central heating seemed as likely to happen as aliens converging over New York. The not-memories that Steve had gotten so good at pushing away, reminding himself that Bucky wasn’t perverted, and forgetting about until Bucky did another casually sexual thing that he was so wont to do in the privacy of their apartment, and the fear and want would flare up again for Steve to quash.

Those not-memories had gone rancid in their vault when Bucky fell off the train, and Steve had lived his last few weeks feeling like he had betrayed his best friend in every way imaginable. Everyone gave him space and slapped his shoulder in empathy, but they had no idea how unworthy Steve was to mourn someone like Bucky. When the ice had rushed up at him, out of all the emotions that swirled inside him, he felt a sense of relief that he didn’t have to constantly be on guard against mourning Bucky too much, or too little, or the wrong way.

The not-memories had been overwhelmed by actual memories when he awoke in SHIELD’s fabricated past and learned how to function in the future, and he had mostly been free of them as he mourned the loss of things and people he’d actually been able to call his own.

But when the Winter Soldier’s mask came off, and Steve realized that Bucky had gone through a much worse hell than Father Dominic could ever have preached, the not-memories came back, and Steve was sickened by everything that had happened to his best friend and the fact that he was still struggling to feel the right feelings about Bucky’s reemergence as a Soviet Assassin.

So when the Potomac tried to swallow him whole, he maybe didn’t try to stop it.

 

Back in his DC apartment, Steve shows Sam what a good little out-patient he can be as he settles down on the couch.

“I hope Fury didn’t mess up my Netflix. I’ve been needing an excuse to get at this queue for a while now.”

Sam rolls his eyes, likely scenting bullshit, and goes to the kitchen to rummage in Steve’s sparse cupboards. In order to make the charade more convincing, Steve actually boots up Netflix and clicks on the first thing that shows up. The program wants him to watch something called Sons of Anarchy and Steve likes motorcycles, so he sets up the first episode and even tucks some pillows around him so he looks like he is ready to settle down.

Sam comes back out with two sandwiches, and Steve is about to warn him that any lunch meat still in his refrigerator is probably a biohazard at this point, as little time as he actually spends here, but Sam says “cheese” through a mouthful of what apparently is just a cheese sandwich. Steve feels a little sorry about that as he accepts his own cheese sandwich, but he didn’t ask Sam to eat his food or stay with him any longer than it took to drop off one super soldier and one duffle bag.

Sam sinks down at the other end of the couch. “You won’t like this,” he says as he continues to chew. The TV show already has Steve bored and irritated – these men may have style, but they’re every inch the cocky bullies that Steve enjoys getting their comeuppance, and the show appears not be about about their comeuppance as much as it glorifies their lifestyle. But it’s the principle of the thing.

“I probably will like it. You don’t know what I do and don’t like.”

“I know that you’d probably like me to scram off right now so you can do something stupid, and I’m just going to tell you; it’s not happening. So you may as well put on something that you do want to watch.”

Steve gives it a little longer before he lets Sam talk him into watching something called Mad Men. And yes, he likes it much better.

 

Sam actually insists on sleeping on the couch, and he promises to wake up every few hours to check on Steve.

“Like you do with coma patients. Because I just don’t feel like they checked that patriotic head enough.”

So Sam is on the couch outside of Steve’s room, and Steve is lying in bed, trying to figure out what he can accomplish of his Bucky search in two-three hours, when Steve hears the glass of his window slide a few inches. Super-hearing is the only reason he is aware of the noise, but suddenly, the room feels charged and Steve bolts upright (which, incidentally, hurts like hell).

A figure is crouched outside his window, which makes Steve fairly nervous because there’s nothing but a ledge between the window and a four-foot drop. The glass sliding stops immediately and Steve catches a glimpse of messy hair and a metal arm before the figure is gone.

Steve leaps out of bed, yanks the window all the way up, and jumps the four stories to the ground below. The landing jolt is like throwing acid on his bullet wounds, but he’s already ignoring it and whipping his head around to see the most likely exit taken by his would-be nocturnal interloper.

He sees nothing.

He steps back and cranes his neck to see if maybe somehow Bucky is on the roof, and he sees Sam’s face staring at him from his bedroom window.

“The FUCK is wrong with you, four floors!!” Sam is yelling, and probably waking up all the non-SHIELD neighbors Steve has left, and Steve is already flagging because, even though Bucky was less than ten feet away from him a minute ago, Steve has no more idea where he is now than ever. Sam continues to make a ruckus until Steve sheepishly waves and says he’s coming back inside.

“Take the stairs!” Sam spits back, like Steve is going to jump straight-up four stories. He’s already heading for the entrance to his building when it hits him.

Bucky was trying to enter his room.

Bucky is a wildcard right now.

Bucky could have been seeking Steve’s help, but there is as much of a chance, Steve admits, that he was trying to kill or capture him.

Steve is prepared to deal with the kill-or-capture scenario, partly because he is almost sure he can take Bucky, and partly because there’s not a doubt in his mind that he’s willing to risk either of those scenarios to help Bucky, no matter that he hardly knows what help Bucky needs.

And the last thought that he has as he jogs up the stairs to his own floor is that Sam and the weight of Hill and Natasha behind him are probably not prepared to deal with ANY scenario involving the Winter Soldier near their recovering Captain.

So he’s already got his lying face on when he enters the apartment and sees Sam’s disappointed look, and he hopes that his lying skills have evolved in the last few hours when he tells Sam that he got spooked by a nightmare and needed some air.

 

Steve has no idea why he is so confident that Bucky will try to break in again the next night, but he is in his pajamas with his teeth brushed by ten. Sam informs him that he has had it with Steve’s weirdness, but Steve is giving off all the signs of cooperation, so Sam tells him to stay in the damn room and settles into the couch with his laptop for a few hours.

It’s not very difficult to pretend to be asleep for several hours (especially because Steve thinks his body might actually be appreciative of how still he is being), but eventually the light in the living room goes off and Steve feels the room charge up again.

He keeps his breathing slow and deep, and it pays off within the hour; he hears the slide of the window, and he lets out a little snore for authenticity. Steve does not snore; in fact, Bucky is the snorer of the two, but he is counting on the Bucky currently in his bedroom not to remember that.

Someone creeps across the floor so quietly that Steve knows he would be oblivious if everything inside of him weren’t straining to hear the footfalls, and Steve flushes with awareness that Bucky is standing over his bed and looking down at him. It brings the not-memories forward in his mind, so Steve starts to internally battle them as Bucky’s shadow bends down and takes a corner of Steve’s quilt. He pulls it back as Steve’s heart shudders and starts beating a mambo of fear, excitement, and, thanks to the poisonous not-memories, desire and guilt.

Bucky pulls the covers back until Steve’s torso is exposed, and the metal hand clinks against the plastic buttons on Steve’s pajamas as Bucky slowly undoes them. Something in Steve’s breathing must alert the intruder to the fact that the intrudee is actually conscious, and he is drawing back when something makes Steve say, “Not moving.”

There is a beat of silence in which neither man moves, and then Steve reaches up and grabs his headboard with both hands. “So I’m not asleep, but I’m not moving, so do what you were going to do.” It’s a stupid move, because the likeliest scenario that Steve can come up with is that Bucky is about to stab him, though Steve has no idea what Bucky gains by getting Steve bare-chested for that. But he really doesn’t want Bucky to run off again, and he’s hoping that his compliance will make up for the fact of his awareness.

Bucky doesn’t say anything or make any movements, but Steve sees the gummy glint of light off his eyes and realizes that Bucky is staring at him. Unmoving, unstabbing, just staring at Steve’s torso in a dark room in the middle of the night. The same gut instinct that had told him Bucky would return to the window now tells him that, whatever Bucky wants, he’s not here to kill Steve. Is he wrestling with his memories? Trying to enlist Steve to do something for him? Wondering why he saved Captain America? Steve tightens his grip on the headboard and says nothing.

A few minutes in to the most dangerous ogling Steve’s ever experienced in his life, Bucky shifts and walks to the other side of the bed. He is quiet, then, raspingly, “healed.”

Steve almost says something back, but he doesn’t think that he is supposed to, so he nods. Yes Bucky, he tries to say with his eyes, you shot me and I am healed. He wonders if this news rings positively or negatively for Bucky.

Bucky remains stock-still and staring for a few more minutes, and Steve can’t help the not-memories from flowing up under his attention. He starts to get hard, and he knows that Bucky can see it, but he thinks that this Bucky’s morality is shaky enough that he won’t react the same way that Steve’s Bucky would have. It’s at that point that Steve realizes he is thinking of his Bucky and the Bucky standing in front of him as two different men, and somehow, that quells the rush of guilt and shame he normally feels when he thinks about his best friend in a less-than-pure way.

This Bucky, 2014 Bucky, notices Steve’s body reacting to him, and Steve almost thinks he can see a furrowed brow. Then Bucky is leaning forward and what Steve can only describe as poking his cock with a flesh and blood finger. Like he is confused about its purpose. Like he is checking to make sure his eyes aren’t deceiving him.

Then Bucky is gone, and the window is sliding shut. Steve is still clenching the headboard, and he has no idea in hell what just happened.

He still jerks off, and he actually feels like less of a terrible person to be imagining the killer than he would his friend.

 

Over the rest of Steve’s recuperation week, Bucky visits him two more times. The first time, he sits down in the corner of Steve’s room without touching him, and they watch each other for several hours. The second time, Bucky does the same thing, but Steve ruts against the mattress, too affected by the swirl of emotions he’s feeling and fairly confident that this Bucky won’t mind.

Sam goes home at the end of the week, feeling sheepish about mothering Steve and being so militant about keeping him in the apartment. Steve shrugs and smiles; of course Captain America wasn’t going to run off to look for Bucky when he’d given his word to stay put.

That night, Bucky enters the room through the window, and Steve immediately grabs the beams of his headboard. He wants to encourage Bucky to come closer to the bed instead of sitting in the corner, and after a moment of calculation, Bucky comes to stand right next to Steve.

Steve still hasn’t asked Bucky anything during this thing that they’re doing, but he can’t be silent tonight.

“Not moving, but why are you here?” Bucky chooses to answer his question with fifteen minutes of staring before saying in the scratchy voice Steve had heard earlier in the week, “You’re in my head.” He seems, if not angry, annoyed by that fact, and Steve blurts out, “You’re in mine.”

Bucky blinks at him, and Steve tacks on, “Bad and good. It’s all there.” He and Bucky used to stay up half the night yammering about inconsequential things they’d seen and done in their days, but right now, Steve thinks this minimalist style of communication is working for them. There’s really nothing truer to him than the fact that Bucky is in his head, and it’s good, and it’s bad. No need for elaboration.

“Bad,” Bucky mumbles, reaching out to touch a healed bullet wound exactly at its center even though Steve has a shirt and a quilt covering it up. “Good,” he says, this time going for Steve’s cock and again hitting it dead-center. Steve loses a second of time while he processes that Bucky’s hand, not just his pointer finger, is currently resting on his cock, before he hears the question in Bucky’s statement.

He has no idea how to respond; it’s true that the basic equation of Bucky + Steve’s cock yields a ‘good’ outcome, but there’s a lot of hatred and disgust wrapped up in his not-memories of Bucky. Bucky wasn’t a pervert like Steve, and knowing how Steve felt about him would have wrecked their friendship, the only thing in Steve’s life worth anything, permanently.

They’d never had a conversation about it, but Steve could remember seeing a group of bullies kicking the life out of a queer kid in an alley and turning in their direction to do something, anything to stop them from beating the boy unconscious. Bucky had grabbed him and firmly steered him towards their apartment.

_“Bucky, those guys-”_

_“No. Just no, Steve. That’s one fight I’m not letting you get involved in.”_

_“What’s the matter with you, they’re going to really hur-”_

_“I said no. If you get involved they’ll think you…you have no idea…I won’t let them do that to you. It’s not happening.”_

Steve had been disappointed that Bucky managed to drag him away from the fight, and he never found out what happened to the boy. But he couldn’t get the image out of his head of Bucky abandoning him the same way he’d walked by the bleeding boy on the street if Bucky knew what Steve thought about when they huddled together for warmth or shared clothing because so few people had the money for clothes that fit properly anyway.

Steve is dragged back to the present by Bucky putting more pressure on the cock he still hasn’t let go of, and he realizes that he didn’t answer Bucky’s question. “Good,” he nearly whispers, unable to deny it. He has no idea how this Bucky, or his Bucky for that matter, know about his not-memories, but he’s denied it until it drove him into the water twice, and maybe honesty is somehow what Bucky needs now.

“Good,” Bucky repeats, sounding thoughtful, and then Steve almost lets go of the beams of his headboard as Bucky suddenly puts a knee on the bed and straddles his neck. Steve makes a surprised noise, but Bucky is working the fastenings on his pants and pulling out his own cock. Steve takes a second to register for the first time that Bucky isn’t in his leather combat gear, but instead in dark and somewhat dirty jeans and a sweatshirt, before Bucky’s cock is in his mouth.

Steve sputters and lets go of the headboard, and immediately, Bucky is standing by the bed, wary and about to run. Steve slowly returns to his hold and Bucky returns to his position above Steve.

“No, Buck, this isn’t what we-” he gets out before Bucky is pushing back in. He grabs Steve’s hands and makes sure that Steve couldn’t let go of the headboard if he tried, and shallowly starts to thrust into Steve’s mouth.

Steve has never had a cock in his mouth, and he’s never had his cock in anyone else’s mouth, and, on top of that, he hasn’t had enough time to really investigate the pornography options offered by this century. All he really knows about this act is from Bucky, describing the things that Fast Girls would do to him as Steve tried to look stern and reproachful and was actually just storing up images for later when he was alone in the apartment. He tries to pull on those memories now; throwing Bucky off of him doesn’t cross his mind until later.

_“So she does this thing with her tongue, like, right on the head…it’s like regular sex and you’re thrusting, but it’s her throat instead of her muff…and she’s sucking, that’s the best part, like suck on your finger and imagine that you’re feeling that on your johnson.”_

_“I’m not doing that, and you’re a cad. I feel bad for those girls who had to taste your slimy, filthy johnson.”_

_“Got to taste, Stevie, got the privilege of tasting Bucky Barnes’ mouth-watering, delicious-”_

_“Aww shaddup and take out the trash.”_

He tries to remember what Bucky told him he liked; using his tongue on the head, relaxing so Bucky could thrust in, sucking as hard as he could. He has no idea if these things are at all pleasurable, but Bucky starts thrusting faster and breathing more wetly, and right about when Steve remembers that he knows how to get out of a hold like this, Bucky comes down his throat and stills.

Steve really isn’t sure what to do with the liquid threatening to push past his lips. He doesn’t remember Bucky telling him what the girls did when he flooded their mouths, but Steve figures that the serum will prevent anything too bad from happening if he swallows a mouthful of Bucky’s ejaculate, so he does. This also facilitates breathing, and it makes it easier for Bucky to pull his cock out of Steve’s mouth without making an embarrassing mess. Bucky takes his hands from where they’d been clenched around Steve’s, and as he clambers off of the bed and tucks himself back in, the knowledge of what just happened slams into Steve.

He gapes at Bucky, unclear how he is supposed to feel about sucking off his perfectly normal best friend-turned Soviet Assassin. He has no idea how many of Bucky’s memories, if any, the man in front of him has at this moment, and he’s not even sure how this Bucky feels about getting his cock sucked by the man he nearly killed and then saved. They both stare at each other and wait to not be the one to say something first, but then Bucky nods slightly, brushes his hand against Steve’s shoulder, and heads for the window. Steve sits up and watches him climb onto the ledge, which can’t be any more than three inches wide, and Bucky tosses back “It is good,” as he drops to the ground below.

Steve pants heavily and feels the rawness of his throat. He doesn’t jerk off tonight. He thinks the emotion that he’s feeling is anger, but it’s difficult to tell and it keeps sliding into other emotions.

 

Bucky makes three more appearances before Steve is asked by Hill to go on a mission and flush out some loyal SHIELD agents in the Northwest. Each time, he climbs on top of Steve, and Steve battles his inner thoughts of ‘he doesn’t want this’ and ‘he can never know’ and ‘maybe this is helping him’ while trying his damndest to make Bucky feel good. He finally gets around to watching internet pornography, and tries to incorporate some of his new information into Bucky’s late-night sessions. They don’t talk, and Bucky still makes him keep his hands on the headboard. One night, when Steve tries to move his hands to Bucky’s legs, Bucky slashes at his hands with the metal fist and grabs something out of his pocket that turns out to be a zip tie; he secures Steve’s hands to the headboard, and Steve is left wondering if Bucky has had that zip tie in his pocket every time he’s visited.

In a hotel in Oregon, Steve thinks that he sees a glint of metal at his window. “Not moving,” he calls out, but there is no headboard and Bucky doesn’t come in the room.

In a hotel in Washington, Steve takes a belt and, feeling foolish, secures his own arms above his head. He waits nearly all night before Bucky slithers through the window. Instead of taking Steve’s mouth like expected, he pushes Steve’s thighs together and rubs himself between them. Every few strokes, his cock brushes against Steve’s and Steve spends the next two days dealing with the fact that he’s both thrilled and sad that their trysts are all about Bucky. He’s thrilled because he doesn’t feel like he’s taking advantage of Bucky, and if and when Bucky gets his memories back, he can claim that he never lay a hand on his best friend in that way – which is technically true. He’s sad because it’s not enough.

Bucky follows him across the country, breaking in one night out of every three. Steve uses his visits as an opportunity to analyze Bucky’s mental and physical health. The murderous craze in his eyes seems to have dimmed, and he looks like he’s lost weight, but not too much. His hair is absolutely filthy; Steve is sure that Bucky rarely bathes and, when he does, forgoes shampoo altogether. His chin is covered in stubble but he’s shaving it occasionally, and he sometimes changes clothes.

The metal arm gives Steve some pause, but Bucky touches him with both arms equally, which is not to say a lot. He remembers the arm being a formidable weapon, but apparently it is fine-tuned enough that Bucky can run its fingers through Steve’s hair without pulling any out of his scalp.

Steve is aware that he should probably be reporting this to someone. SHIELD is a mess, but enough agents are reorganized under Tony Stark’s company name that he could get a team of agents on Bucky. He knows where he’s going to be, kind of, and Bucky would certainly lose a few seconds if a TAC team burst in on him while his cock was in Steve’s mouth. Or between his thighs. Or rutting up against his abs. Whatever Bucky is in the mood for, Steve pliantly goes along with.  
But apart from the humiliation of letting Hill’s people catch him fellating the Winter Soldier, Steve knows that he can’t betray Bucky like that. He has no idea what Bucky is thinking when he comes to Steve, but he knows that Bucky is dealing with who he is, what memories he has, and his freedom from Hydra, and while he doesn’t know if Bucky is exactly dealing swimmingly, he’s doing it near Steve. Steve is somehow a part of this process.

He resolves to continue giving Bucky whatever he needs until something changes. Then he’ll go after him in daylight like he’d planned to after Bucky pulled him out of the Potomac. And things will go from there.

 

Steve is losing a battle against four very large and very lethal robots because his back-up is taking forever to get to him. He uses the shield to knock the legs out from under one as he jumps and punches another, but they keep getting right back up and firing lasers at the bystanders stupid enough to stand around and film the fight on their phones. Their presence is a large part in why Steve is restricting himself to the shield and fists, and he would really appreciate them leaving so he could set off the grenades in his belt OR perhaps the timely arrival of the Quinjet with more specialized weapons.

A robot limb smashes Steve in the head, and he goes a bit dizzy for a moment. This is absolutely not how it’s supposed to happen; these robots don’t even belong to anyone evil, they’re just malfunctioning military weapons who started destroying an Air Force base in Illinois, and Steve was the closest Avenger in the area. His dizziness makes him stumble and a laser melts part of his boot – really? – when one of the robots collapses and another trips over its form. Steve looks up to see the glint of metal on a rooftop, and realizes that he’s again been monumentally stupid where Bucky is concerned. Of course Bucky is following him; he’s been following him for a while. And while Steve wouldn’t go so far as to classify Bucky as a good guy yet, he’s shown an interest in Steve that would make him cranky when someone was getting the upper hand on Steve in a fight. Steve smiles in Bucky’s direction and feels the flurry of doubt he’s been carrying in his gut since the first blow job dissipate.

Whatever is going on with Bucky, it’s brought him here, on Steve’s six, like he belongs. He’s not out shooting up shopping malls or going back to his former life as an assassin. He’s, in his own fucked up way, roadtripping with Steve, and now he’s protecting Steve, and that’s worth an interminable amount of sex as far as Steve is concerned.

A robot steps on his head as he smiles at Bucky, and he remembers that in order to keep Bucky, he has to not die.

 

Steve wakes up in another hospital room. Sam is on his left again, and there’s no sign of Bucky.

“Dude, when they told me you were unconscious in a hospital in Chicago, I was like ‘Can’t this guy just take a load off for a while?’” Sam chides, but he looks relieved that Steve’s eyes are open.

“Where’s Bucky?” he asks, starting to get out of bed. His head doesn’t even really hurt; this is much better than the last time he was in the hospital.

“How do you know about that? That all happened after you blacked out.”

“What all happened?”

“The winter soldier freaked the fuck out on those robots. He put bullets in each of them, and then tore them apart with his own robot arm. I saw it on the news, and I was pumped because I’ve been keeping my ear to the ground but I haven’t heard or seen anything about him since he shot you. Then I realized that you were on the news too, that that was your spangly ass on the ground while he cleaned up. Did you know he was there? Were you following him too?”

Steve smiles what might be a smirk, because Sam doesn’t know the half of it. As he shouldn’t, because it’s the most private thing Steve has ever done.

“Nah. I just want to get back to DC and my own bed. I’m not looking for him anymore.”

 

Steve is forced to spend one night in the hospital. When he wakes up, he thinks it is because Sam is moving around, but Sam is sleeping slackjawed in the chair on his left. He turns to his right, and starts when he sees Bucky standing over him.

“Buck!” Bucky continues staring, and Steve suddenly wonders if Bucky is going to instigate their usual activities. He panics momentarily, and Bucky turns to move away.

His hand reaches out to grab the first piece of Bucky he can get, which happens to be his thigh. Bucky doesn’t exactly look happy about Steve’s grip, but Steve needs to thank him for what happened. For showing himself and saving Steve’s life, or at least saving him from a hospital stay exceeding 24 hours. He tries to communicate this in his grip, but Bucky’s eyes don’t acknowledge his message. So he opens his mouth to say “thank you,” and instead says “Don’t run out.” Bucky grinds his teeth, but moves closer to Steve. He slowly kneels down on the tiled floor next to Steve’s bed, and he rests his chin on Steve’s arm. They stare at each other for a while, that hasn’t changed, but Bucky is touching him in a way he’s never touched him in the whole time they’ve been doing this thing.

Steve wakes up a few hours later and Bucky is gone. Sam is also awake, and seems to have no idea that they had an unauthorized visitor in the night, and Steve lets the doctors poke and prod.

 

A week later, Steve is back in DC, and Bucky is climbing through the window. He quirks an eyebrow at Steve who sitting up in bed. His hands are already secured with super-strength handcuffs that he borrowed from a former SHIELD safehouse, but he is sitting up and looking straight at Bucky. They’ve spent enough time staring at each other that Steve thinks he is learning to read this Bucky’s body language, and of course, his body language was never really that far off from the old Bucky’s. Steve clears his throat as Bucky seems to debate whether he should stay or go, and then Steve starts talking.

“It’s good. And it’s bad. Because I don’t know what you’re thinking about this. I don’t know how much of my Bucky is in there, and I don’t know how much I care. But whatever we’re doing, it’s helping you. And that’s what really matters to me.” Bucky is silent and unmoving so long that Steve’s confidence wavers. “Of course, it would help me to know what you remember. And to know why you want this.” Still nothing. Steve finally gives up; this push that he’s doing, to make Bucky understand that he needs to start letting Steve in, doesn’t look like it’s working. He finally sighs and says, “Get over here, Bucky. I’m ready for you.”

Bucky’s eyes flicker up and down Steve’s body, taking in his secured hands, and speaks.

“Steve?”

“Yeah?” Steve startles, unable to remember if Bucky had called him by name at all since coming back.

“You’re a punk.” He grins and it’s warm.


	2. Bucky

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "It’s so good to have these pieces of information to layer on top of each other instead of isolated facts about Steve, and then it’s too much. 
> 
> Bucky fleetingly thinks that he could do this mouth thing to Steve before it’s too much and he has to leave because he’s going to get just as sick on these memories as he did on the bloody ones." 
> 
> The winter soldier's perspective on the events of last chapter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my gosh you guys; I was so flattered by the kudos and bookmarks on this little one-shot that it grew another chapter. Please let me know if you have any ideas you'd like to see, should this keep growing. 
> 
> This got VERY fluffy in some parts, but I also wanted to keep it a little bit dark, so I tried to balance them.

The winter soldier dangles his legs off the GWU Hospital roof and revels in the moment of carelessness. It makes him want to slip a cigarette he doesn’t own (or know where to get) into his mouth. The memory of dangling his legs off of buildings, bridges, even a few snowy hills drifts over him, and he snarls at the twofold feeling of being there and here.

Remembering is unpleasant. It isn’t foreign to the winter soldier; he remembers remembering in a loose, unspecific way. He knows that he always starts to remember sporadic details the longer he remains out of Cryofreeze, and it’s for that reason that he usually goes willingly into the chamber. Remembering has never improved his ability to complete a mission.

Right now, though, he has no mission other than the objectives he sets for himself. Obtain plainclothes [Completed]. Restock weapons [Completed]. Locate Captain Rogers [Completed]. He’s equally thrilled and terrified to choose his own missions, but he knows that he needs the mission to avoid thinking about what the destruction of Hydra means for him.

Remembering, he can handle; a life without purpose and instruction, he cannot.

He’s thinking too much, so it’s time for a new mission. He’s espied Captain Rogers through windows and ceiling vents, but he needs to know how much damage he did to his former target. Current target? Status TBD; pending more information. His mission: Ascertain Captain Rogers’ post-shooting condition via appropriation of medical chart.

Twenty minutes later, the winter soldier possesses both a medical chart and a pack of cigarettes with a lighter helpfully tucked inside. Smoking is an unsatisfactory experience and he knows (remembers) that it tastes wrong. The medical chart, however, is much more pleasing; Captain Rogers has three bullet wounds, but is expected to make a full recovery within the month. He is required to stay in the hospital for a minimum of three days. He is on extremely high dosages of extremely potent painkillers, and an equation that likely indicates how quickly his body burns through the drugs is scribbled next to some notes about the Captain’s “advanced condition.”

The winter soldier returns to the instruction that Captain Rogers is to stay in the hospital for three days to allow for observation and treatment. Three days is an effective amount of time for a typical mission (stalking, hiding, wet work, collection) but these simplistic missions of survival are nowhere near enough to keep him occupied for three days. He realizes that he needs to set bigger missions for himself, and in casting his mind about for worthwhile tasks, he remembers Captain Rogers’s words on the helicarrier.

“You’re my friend.” “Your name is James Buchanan Barnes.” “I’m with you ‘til the end of the line.”

They made him angry because they make that twofold feeling wash over him. He can almost hear those words in another voice or another place layered over the Captain’s voice and the ship falling apart around them. It was distracting and frustrating.

It’s time to find out if they hold any truth, or if the Captain was lying to him to get the upper hand.

His mission: Find out who James Buchanan Barnes is, and ascertain the following: Is he connected with Captain Rogers and/or the winter soldier.

 

Bucky spends the next three days at the Smithsonian and the intervening nights squatting in an apartment equipped with internet and a non-password protected desktop computer. Bucky’s skill set has not been fully updated to prepare him for the technology of this decade, but his breaking and entering skills are flawless.

And that’s another thing – he’s Bucky now. He knows that the person portrayed on museum walls and dozens of historical websites is long gone, but he thinks that the man’s memories might be buried deep inside his head, if the recent twofold consciousness is anything to go by. He remembers insignificant things like a brand of beer he liked, or the fact that his apartments were always full of pencil nubs. He also knows that Bucky and the Captain shared a close friendship that baffles him because he can’t wrap his head around what one does with a person they spend hours with every day. Do they talk? What could they talk about for that long? It sounds exhausting and unnecessary.

But he’s decided to be Bucky because it seems useful to have a name. A first-person identifier. He’s done without one before, of course, but he remembers that he always appreciating having a name on his missions. He can’t bring any of the names he’s been assigned for missions to the front of his mind, but he thinks that they were all very ethnic to help him blend in. ‘Bucky’ is vastly different from anything he’s been called for 70 years.

Bucky watches the Captain and his winged companion settle into a nondescript sofa and stare at a television. He watches from atop the building across the street, using his naked eyes in place of a sniper scope because he personally can always feel when he’s in someone’s crosshairs. It’s like a caress, and Bucky won’t alert Captain Rogers to his presence until he gives himself a new mission.

His mission, he decides, is to continue evaluating Captain Rogers’s physical status. It becomes more difficult without access to a medical chart and a barrage of machines and people, but that simply ups the complexity of the mission. And observing the super soldier’s healing process is clearly a valuable mission whatever its outcome. Hydra will want to know how long it takes Captain America to heal from three bullets, and Bucky Barnes would probably want to know how his friend was feeling after sustaining such an injury. Especially considering the responsible party.

When Captain Rogers looks to be asleep, Bucky crosses the street and climbs to the top of the apartment building. It’s not difficult to swing from the roof and drop two stories to Rogers’s window ledge and the window is only slightly locked and somewhat sticky, both of which Bucky has tools to deal with. He slides the now-silent window up, but Rogers isn’t as unconscious as he seems, and he immediately sits up and focuses on Bucky’s form in the window.

Damn.

Bucky jumps to the nearest window ledge and grabs a drainpipe that he hopes is tightly bolted to the building. He uses the pipe to swing himself around the corner of the apartment building, putting himself out of sight exactly as Rogers jumps out the window and lands in an inelegant crouch.

‘Idiot’ wells up in his subconscious as he watches Rogers wince and then right himself, frantically scanning the area for his intruder. Rogers scans the roof and surrounding streets, but Bucky knows he won’t be seen. The companion leans out to scream obscenities at Rogers, and as Rogers rounds the building to head for the entrance, Bucky is already letting himself into the adjacent window.

He sweeps the apartment and determines that it shares an adjoining wall with Rogers’s. It is, also, empty. A woman lives here, a nurse, but she has not been home in several days. Bucky thinks it will make an adequate camp as he waits for his next opportunity to assess the damage to Rogers.

 

Steve, because he’s Steve now, is annoyed with his companion. Bucky knows this because he can hear raised voices at times through the wall, and the floor next door squeaks something awful when Steve paces on it. He started thinking of Rogers as “Steve” after thinking about Captain America bruised and bloodied on the helicarrier suddenly rolls over into an image of a smaller version of the man (Bucky recognizes him from the museum, so he isn’t that disoriented) bruised and bloodied in a bathtub.

In the memory, Bucky’s hands are softly pouring water over Steve’s head and wiping his face with a washcloth while his mouth is harshly complaining about acts of stupidity committed by some “twerp who can’t look in a fucking mirror and figure out that he needs to be careful when he runs his mouth about some guy two times his size, no matter how much of a jerk to women he is…”

Bucky guesses that this is something else they did – bathing? It doesn’t seem that farfetched, because he can also remember his handlers hosing him down while giving him an earful for an unnecessary risk he’d taken, so he assumes that talking while bathing is just one permutation of communicating. Interestingly, he has no curiosity about the unnecessary risk that had sent his handlers into such a spitting rage, but he is very curious about the sensory memory of having Steve’s skin under his hands. He wishes he could remember what it felt like to touch skin that wasn’t chapped by flash freezing or crisscrossed by scars. It would probably feel pleasant.

He vaguely monitors the situation next door while taking care of the daily missions that now fall to him to keep track of (another exhausting thing). He completes his hygiene, nutrition, and waste management missions before tasking himself with discovering at least three secrets belonging to the owner of this apartment. The secrets are not as mundane as he’d expected: the owner is a SHIELD agent with an impressive weapons cache and an infatuation with Steve. The last secret irritates Bucky for some reason.

When Steve has been in bed for several hours and the companion finally goes to sleep, Bucky springs to the window and makes it all the way into Steve’s room this time. Steve’s breathing sounds normal (a memory of a wheeze and an accompanying stab of panic in Bucky’s gut blooms), and his posture seems relaxed, so the outward signs point to recovery. Bucky needs a closer look, though, so he moves forward and almost has Steve’s silly, striped shirt unbuttoned before he realizes that he’s made a grave error.

Steve is awake, and Bucky is poised for flight when the man suddenly grabs the wooden posts between his bed and the wall and tells Bucky that he’s not going to move. For some reason, Bucky trusts his word, and he looks his fill at the bullet wounds before noticing that Steve’s body is pumping blood to his genitals. Steve’s breathing speeds up to the point that Bucky is unable to comprehend how he mimicked the slow inhale and exhale of sleep earlier, and Bucky suddenly wants something.

He waits for the memory to slide in, but it doesn’t. He can’t remember anything about Steve’s genitals, other than the random thought, “johnson,” that jolts through his mind. What does feel familiar, though, is the unspecified wanting feeling that comes from a corner of his mind so deeply tucked away that Bucky thinks he himself may have put it there; and suddenly, it’s all he can think about. He barely finishes his assessment of the shiny scars over Steve’s wounds before he is reaching his hand forward to tap Steve’s erection, and even as he’s doing it, he is sure that it is an illogical reaction. He does not know what this feeling demands of him, and touching his finger to the erection does not appear to do anything, so he leaves.

His mission: Figure out what the hell his mind is doing, and make it stop.

 

The next night, Bucky has every intention of going to see Steve and investigating some new hypotheses, but he remembers shooting a woman in a jungle, and then another woman, and then another woman, before finding the old man they’d been trying to conceal from him. This reminds him of stabbing a couple and then shooting the child they’d hidden from him in a chest of drawers, and then he’s suddenly curled up in the bathtub because it seems like the best option when one is vomiting and prostrate at the same time. He does not go to Steve. Part of him feels like he’s abandoning something important, but most of him is glad that none of this blood will rub off on Steve’s silly, striped shirt.

 

Again, the next night, Bucky remembers planting a bomb and sitting in a café to nurse a cup of black coffee and watch the TV news reporters hike the death count up up up. And a bridegroom whom Bucky strangled with the strap of his new wife’s purse, the wife on the floor with a butter knife embedded in her forehead. Bucky is furious that this apartment he chose does not have a washing machine to cleanse his vomit and sweat-encrusted clothes; he gets rid of them in dumpster near the building and secures new ones from a store even though he is having difficulty arranging his face into the innocuous look he thought that he’d perfected.

 

Bucky gets through the next day without remembering some heinous thing that he’s done, and he goes to see Steve that night even though he still feels like he’s dripping with something poisonous inside and out. He sits in the corner of Steve’s room and watches Steve, but he doesn’t touch him for fear that something of him will smudge off on Steve.

He gets stronger as the week passes, and the next time he checks in on Steve, the recovering soldier turns onto his stomach and moves his hips in little motions that set a new burn in Bucky’s gut. He remembers this, remembers the tiny movements and the breathy gulps of air from a stretch of time (length indeterminable) spent sleeping within five feet of Steve. He remembers these actions from Steve twining with the wanting in his own mind, but he also remembers the urge to hide the fact of his observations from Steve. He doesn’t hide his stare now; Steve can take note of Bucky’s eyes on his hips or not, but Bucky thinks that in the dark, in the future, with a few dozen grisly kills in the back of his mind, this can’t even count as a sin anymore.

 

The companion’s departure from Steve’s space is of great importance to Bucky. Now he has Steve all to himself, and the timing is ideal because he thinks that he’s figured out what he wants from Steve. While examining his own genitals, he is struck by the memory of a small blonde head moving between his legs. He thinks that the head belongs to Steve at first, but enough details from the memory fill in to make him aware that the head belongs to a female; not remembering her name feels natural in a way that many of his memory gaps do not. She reminded him very much of Steve, however, and he can conjure up enough of the feelings associated with the memory that he thinks he’s found the thing he wants from Steve.

He enters Steve’s bedroom that night, and Steve grabs his bed immediately. This is a good thing, Bucky realizes, because he’s still skittish around Steve. Knowing that Steve is immobilized boosts his willingness to approach him. He has no idea how to make the event he wants come about, however, so he settles for maneuvering himself on top of Steve and hoping that this is the correct action.

There is a moment in which Steve seems not to want it, and Bucky realizes that his logic is flawed, and he needs to move out and regroup immediately, but then Steve’s mouth is doing all the things that Bucky remembered and more. It feels amazing; Bucky is reasonably certain that no one has done this to him since the blonde girl from his memory, and somehow being this close to Steve is making his brain leak all the knowledge it’s been suppressing about their life together into the forefront of his memory. It feels like a pool of Steve sloshing around in his head; suddenly he remembers not just the fact that Steve insisted on shaving every week even though he could barely produce facial hair, but the smell of the soap and the shick of the razor and the goofy way Steve was always forgetting spots of lather behind the hinges of his jaws.

It’s so good to have these pieces of information to layer on top of each other instead of isolated facts about Steve, and then it’s too much. Bucky fleetingly thinks that he could do this mouth thing to Steve before it’s too much and he has to leave because he’s going to get just as sick on these memories as he did on the bloody ones.

 

Steve is packing his belongings and loading up a car, but he’s being incredibly obvious about it. Bucky is almost confident that Steve is inviting Bucky to follow him, and while he doesn’t need the clues or the invitation to tail Steve anywhere, he feels wanted. He feels like the video of Bucky Barnes from the museum where Bucky and Steve laughed together and the audience looked on and wanted to be a part of that camaraderie. Technically, Bucky knows that he and Steve barely communicate, Steve wants him to be someone that he isn’t ever going to fully be, and Bucky is to some extent using Steve to dig deeper into his own repressed psyche, but Steve does not appear to be inviting anyone else to shadow him.

Bucky has lots of missions now; he constantly has to find new shelter and travel without attracting attention, and, in addition, the constantly changing scenery triggers bad days more often than good. He can’t check in on Steve every night, because sometimes he’s too dirty and too damaged for such a good man.

It seems more and more likely that he isn’t going to be collected from this mission anytime soon; whomever was responsible for his extraction and care appears to be dead or on the run, and Bucky is likely one of many assets who slipped through the cracks when the organization showed its hand and then allowed itself to be defeated by a fracture group of Avengers. Bucky doesn’t care about his former handlers, but he worries about how long he can keep giving himself his own missions. Unless he’s with Steve, it’s starting to wear a little thin.

He likes climbing on top of Steve, and his brain invents new ways to get close to Steve and indulge the want. He rubs against Steve rather than thrusting into his mouth, and it’s just as good because this way, Steve’s mouth is free to make little sounds. He still can’t handle being near Steve unless Steve is secured in some way, and he still flees out the window as soon as he is finished taking his pleasure from Steve, but Steve looks at him with these deep blue eyes full of trust, and Bucky thinks that Steve gets it and is willing to work on Bucky’s terms.

Bucky also thought, however, that Steve understood how utterly lost Bucky would be without Steve in this new and strange world, but Steve gets himself into a fight with a series of weapons contract robots that isn’t going well for him until Bucky retrieves a rifle from the camper he’s been borrowing and starts protecting Steve like a reflex. He finds it difficult to breathe for a few seconds when he sees Steve’s eyes close after a particularly heavy stomp, and he finds himself pulling on the winter soldier like a coat he’s refused to wear all season. When the Stark agents (who are fooling no one) show up to back up Steve, they find a livid Russian assassin establishing a perimeter around Captain America and barking out orders to their medical team.

No one quite knows what to make of it, but they follow his instructions for shifting Steve’s body onto a portable stretcher (“Watch his neck or I’ll break yours”) and moving the American hero to a medical facility.

 

Bucky risks going into Steve’s hospital room and staying with him for longer than it takes to steal a medical chart this time, even though the companion is back and could wake up at any moment. The risk seems insubstantial; every minute spent with Steve helps Bucky reclaim himself and push aside the murderous rage that still possesses him when he thinks of Steve standing up to bullies and getting beat up in return.

When Steve is back in his own apartment, Bucky walks up to the apartment and cases the residents using the lighting patterns of windows. The true owner of Bucky’s apartment seems to have returned, and Bucky feels a flash of something slimy when he remembers her feelings for Steve. He is also annoyed that he will have to find a new place to camp, but then a reckless idea possesses him. He knows that the companion dropped Steve off but did not stay, so perhaps Bucky could take his place on the sofa? It sounds impossible; no way Steve will want a stray murderer sleeping and eating nearby, but on the other hand, Steve places an undeserved level of trust in Bucky, and maybe it will extend to this.

He climbs up to the ledge and enters the room like normal, and Steve is waiting for him, this time in handcuffs. They look very strong, possibly vibranium like his shield, and Bucky thinks he will probably have to assist Steve in getting out of them. This will mean being around Steve when he can move around and possibly even touch Bucky, but the thought no longer terrifies. For every reason why that’s a bad, dangerous, frightening idea, he thinks that maybe it will be like his memories of Steve, and the memories are what he’s been chasing.

Steve wants to talk about his feelings like a punk, and Bucky realizes that for the first time since he started remembering, he feels happy in the Now. He isn’t just remembering how it felt to be happy with Steve, but he’s making a new memory and it’s a pretty good one, full of promise and nostalgia altogether.

He decides that his new mission, for the foreseeable future, is to make sure that Steve is also happy. He’s going to need to remember more things that Steve likes and clamp down on the panic that descends whenever he feels too much and wants to run out on Steve, but he’s going to work on it and get it perfect.

Until he gets collected.

**Author's Note:**

> Dub-con warning: The Winter Soldier wants Steve and forces himself onto Steve without any official consent. Steve doesn't stop him because he has always wanted Bucky, but they never had a sexual relationship in real life. They each think that the other's consent is dubious.


End file.
